Hungarian, or Magyar (, ), is a Ugric language of the Uralic language family spoken in Hungary and parts of several neighboring countries. It is the official language of Hungary and one of the 24 official languages of the European Union. Outside Hungary, it is also spoken by Hungarian communities in southern Slovakia, western Ukraine (Transcarpathia), central and western Romania (Transylvania), northern Serbia (Vojvodina), northern Croatia, northeastern Slovenia (Prekmurje), and eastern Austria (Burgenland).
It is also spoken by Hungarian diaspora communities worldwide, especially in North America (particularly the United States and Canada) and Israel. With 14 million speakers, it is the Uralic family's most widely spoken language.
Classification
Hungarian is a member of the Uralic language family. Linguistic connections between Hungarian and other Uralic languages were noticed in the 1670s, and the family's existence was established in 1717. Hungarian is assigned to the Ugric branch along with the Mansi and Khanty languages of western Siberia (Khanty–Mansia region of North Asia). However, there is debate on whether that is a valid grouping. Historically, the language was written using the Old Hungarian script, an alphabetic writing system believed to derive from the Old Turkic script.
When the Samoyedic languages were determined to be part of the family, some linguists initially assumed that Finnic and Ugric were closer to each other than to the Samoyedic branch of the family. That is now frequently rejected.
The name of Hungary could be a result of regular sound changes of Ungrian/Ugrian, and the fact that the Eastern Slavs referred to Hungarians as (sg. ) seemed to confirm that.. Current literature favors the hypothesis that it comes from the name of the Turkic tribe Onoğur (which means or ).
Genetic studies have identified Y‑DNA haplogroups in ethnic Hungarians, such as N3a‑L708 (most common in Siberia), R1a‑Z93 (most common in Kazakhstan), and C2‑M217 (most common in Mongolia). These findings and others have been interpreted by some researchers as supporting a westward migration of ancestors from regions around present-day eastern Siberia and present-day Mongolia approximately 4,500 years ago to the Carpathian Basin.
History
Prehistory Academic consensus The traditional view holds that Hungarian diverged from its Ugric relatives in the first half of the 1st millennium BC, to the east of the southern Urals in western Siberia. Iranian loanwords in Hungarian date around the time when the Ugric family broke up and probably span well over a millennium. They include 'cow' (cf. Avestan ); 'ten' (cf. Avestan ); 'milk' (cf. Persian 'wet nurse'); and 'reed' (from late Middle Iranian; cf. Middle Persian and Modern Persian ).
Archaeological evidence from present-day southern Bashkortostan confirms the existence of Hungarian settlements between the Volga River and the Ural Mountains. Later the Onoğurs (and Bulgars) had a great influence on the language, especially between the 5th and 9th centuries. This layer of Turkic loans is large and varied (e.g. , from Turkic, and , from the related Permic languages) including words borrowed from Oghur Turkic, e.g. (cf. Chuvash , vs. Turkish ), and 'noon, south' (cf. Chuvash vs. Turkish dial. ).Róna-Tas & Berta, WOT 2011/1: 291-4. Many words related to agriculture, government and even family relationships show evidence of such backgrounds. Hungarian syntax and grammar were not so dramatically influenced over these three centuries.
After the Hungarians arrived in the Carpathian Basin, the language came into contact with a variety of speech communities, including Slavic, Turkic, and German. Turkic loans from this period come mainly from the Pechenegs and Cumanians, who settled in Hungary during the 12th and 13th centuries, e.g. "cobza" (cf. Turkish 'lute'); , also known as mop dog (< *kumandur < Cuman). About 20% of Hungarian loanwords are borrowed from neighbouring Slavic languages, e.g. 'poppy seed', 'Wednesday', 'Thursday'... and 'Christmas'.Gábor Zaicz, Etimológiai szótár: Magyar szavak és toldalékok eredete , s.v. "karácsony" (Tinta Könyvkiadó, 2006). These languages in turn borrowed words from Hungarian: e.g. Serbo-Croatian from Hungarian 'spade'. About 1.6 percent of the Romanian lexicon is of Hungarian origin.
In the 21st century, studies support an origin of the Uralic languages, including early Hungarian, in eastern or central Siberia, somewhere between the Ob and Yenisei rivers or near the Sayan mountains in the Russian–Mongolian border region. A 2019 study based on genetics, archaeology and linguistics, found that early Uralic speakers arrived in Europe from the east, specifically from eastern Siberia.
Historical controversy over origins Today, the consensus among linguists is that Hungarian is a member of the Uralic family of languages. The Uralic language family is among the most firmly established and best-studied language families in the world. Nevertheless, a number of alternative views have been proposed which do not have any currency among present-day linguists.
The classification of Hungarian as a Uralic/Finno-Ugric rather than a Turkic language continued to be a matter of impassioned political controversy throughout the 18th and into the 19th centuries. During the latter half of the 19th century, a competing hypothesis proposed a Turkic affinity of Hungarian, or, alternatively, that both the Uralic and the Turkic families formed part of a superfamily of Ural–Altaic languages. Following an academic debate known as ("the Ugric-Turkic war"), the Finno-Ugric hypothesis was concluded the sounder of the two, mainly based on work by the German linguist Josef Budenz.
Hungarians did, in fact, absorb some Turkic influences during several centuries of cohabitation. The influence on Hungarians was mainly from the Turkic Oghur speakers such as Sabirs, Bulgars of Atil, Kabars and Khazars. The Oghur tribes are often connected with the Hungarians whose exoethnonym is usually derived from Onogurs (> (H)ungars), a Turkic tribal confederation. The similarity between customs of Hungarians and the Chuvash people, the only surviving member of the Oghur tribes, is visible. For example, the Hungarians appear to have learned animal husbandry techniques from the Oghur speaking Chuvash people (or historically Suvar people), as a high proportion of words specific to agriculture and livestock are of Chuvash origin. A strong Chuvash influence was also apparent in Hungarian burial customs.
Old Hungarian The first written accounts of Hungarian date to the 10th century, such as mostly Hungarian personal names and place names in , written in Greek by Eastern Roman Emperor Constantine VII. No significant texts written in Old Hungarian script have survived, because the medium of writing used at the time, wood, is perishable.
The Kingdom of Hungary was founded in 1000 by Stephen I. The country became a Western-styled Christian (Roman Catholic) state, with Latin script replacing Hungarian runes. The earliest remaining fragments of the language are found in the establishing charter of the abbey of Tihany from 1055, intermingled with Latin text. The first extant text fully written in Hungarian is the Funeral Sermon and Prayer, which dates to the 1190s. Although the orthography of these early texts differed considerably from that used today, contemporary Hungarians can still understand a great deal of the reconstructed spoken language, despite changes in grammar and vocabulary.
A more extensive body of Hungarian literature arose after 1300. The earliest known example of Hungarian religious poetry is the 14th-century Lamentations of Mary. The first Bible translation was the Hussite Bible in the 1430s.
The standard language lost its diphthongs, and several postpositions transformed into suffixes, including "onto" (the phrase "onto the way" found in the 1055 text would later become ). There were also changes in the system of vowel harmony. At one time, Hungarian used six verb tenses, while today only two or three are used.The future is formed with an auxiliary verb, and so is sometimes not counted as a separate tense. (See also: periphrasis.)
Modern Hungarian
In 1533, Kraków printer Benedek Komjáti published (modern orthography: ), the first Hungarian-language book set in movable type.
By the 17th century, the language already closely resembled its present-day form, although two of the past tenses remained in use. German, Italian and French loans also began to appear. Further Turkish words were borrowed during the period of Ottoman rule (1541 to 1699).
In the 19th century, a group of writers, most notably Ferenc Kazinczy, spearheaded a process of (language revitalization). Some words were shortened ( > , 'victory' or 'triumph'); a number of dialectal words spread nationally (e.g., 'dawdle'); extinct words were reintroduced (, 'décor'); a wide range of expressions were coined using the various derivative suffixes; and some other, less frequently used methods of expanding the language were utilized. This movement produced more than ten thousand words, most of which are used actively today.
The 19th and 20th centuries saw further standardization of the language, and differences between mutually comprehensible dialects gradually diminished.
In 1920, Hungary signed the Treaty of Trianon, losing 71 percent of its territory and one-third of the ethnic Hungarian population along with it.
Today, the language holds official status nationally in Hungary and regionally in Romania, Slovakia, Serbia, Austria and Slovenia.
In 2014 the proportion of Transylvanian students studying Hungarian exceeded the proportion of Hungarian students, which shows that the effects of Romanianization are slowly getting reversed and regaining popularity. The Dictate of Trianon resulted in a high proportion of Hungarians in the surrounding 7 countries, so it is widely spoken or understood. Although host countries are not always considerate of Hungarian language users, communities are strong. The Szeklers, for example, form their own region and have their own national museum, educational institutions, and hospitals.
In the non-standard varieties of European languages there are to be found loanwords from Romani. Hungarian also has some Romani loanwords due to the large Roma population living in Hungary.
Geographic distribution
CountrySpeakersNotesHungary 9,896,333 2011Romania (mainly Transylvania) 1,038,806 2021Slovakia422,065 2021Serbia (mainly Vojvodina)241,164 2011Stojšin, S. (2015). Ethnic Diversity of Population in Vojvodina at the Beginning of the 21st Century. European Quarterly of Political Attitudes and Mentalities, 4(2), 25-37. https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:0168-ssoar-428644Germany217,0002023Ukraine (mainly Zakarpattia)149,400 2001Ukrainian census 2001. .United States117,973 2000Canada75,555 2001Israel70,000Austria (historical minorities in Burgenland)40,5832001Australia17,0432021Croatia7,2182021Slovenia (mainly Prekmurje)9,240Japan7532019Total12–13 million Source: National censuses, Ethnologue